Uncertainty of Households Income in the European Union Countries and in Poland.

The paper examines the uncertainty of household income in the European Union countries and in one of accession countries - Poland. Data used in the paper are from the Household Budget Surveys for a panel of twelve European Union countries in years 1995- 1998 and a Polish households' panel for 1997-2000. The uncertainty of household income was decomposed into a variance of shocks to permanent income and a variance of shocks to transitory income. For particular countries, we assess these two measures of income uncertainty using different criteria: age, gender, main economic activity, education and a professional status of the household head.